10 Things I Would Fix If I Worked At Roblox

by cadytip on December 20, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

My kids are big Roblox fans, with Builder’s Club accounts and racking up many hours of gaming per week. This post was written by my 13 year old daughter. She’s going to be writing more for Gaming and Tech now, on our Kids’ Games Beat. ~Robyn Tippins, Owner

Changing Your Moniker

1. You should be able to change your name. You’ll notice many complaints about this because many people really dislike their name. In many cases their distaste is due to the fact that they created the screen name when they were several years younger. What is cool at age 9 is much less cool at age 13. Even if you had to email customer service to get it done, having that ability would be a nice change.

Bring Back the Old Building Tools

2. The new building tools are terrible. Many people can be heard complaining about the new layout for the building and the horrible building tools. I personally hate the new updates for building the site has. The old building style was far better and many people (me included) would be more than welcome to have it back.

Let Us Delete Our Accounts

3. This is really a basic internet right. I like my account and have no plans to delete it, but what happens if a user feels differently? What happens if Mom decides she doesn’t want her kids on Roblox? Right now, the answer is that nothing happens. Lots of accounts just sit there and take up space on the site. Many old accounts are only removed if they are deleted by the moderators due to abuse.

I do understand why they hide that option. An accidental deletion by a click-happy 7 year old can cause much work for the development team (or the PR team if they can’t reinstate these accidental deletions). However, there should be a way for a parent to delete an account. Honestly, I’m surprised it’s not an option.

Notify Us When Tagged

4. People can use your name on someone’s wall, @namehere, and Roblox will not notify you. Others can go to your profile if they find your name on a wall, but you’ll never even know it’s there. No one complains about this so it’s possible most kids haven’t noticed yet.

People can talk trash about you with their friends, giving a link to your profile, and you’ll never know unless you happen upon their page at the time that it’s still up. I think you should be notified if someone uses your name and links to your profile.

Give Us Some Info About Updates

5. When Roblox updates their site the whole thing shuts down telling you they’ve had an update. When it’s back up, everything goes right back to normal like it never happened. So if you were not literally on Roblox at the time of the update, you’d never even know they had an update. Even if you were online, once it’s back up you wouldn’t notice the update unless you it was an obvious one, they could’ve added a great new feature and you wouldn’t know unless you happened across it.

They need to send out notices telling you whats been updated. And, if they know they’re going to experience some downtime, they should do what all other sites do… They let you know ahead of time.

Make Archived Messages Disappear

6. You should be able to hide/delete your messages. That’s expected user behavior. Instead, when you click archive they just sit there in a box with all the others. Most people’s inboxes are cluttered with an insane amount of messages. Not being able to delete or archive the messages causes clutter and mess. There are many complaints about this.

Let Me Talk More About Me

7. For your personal blurb there is a 1000 character limit. Many of us need more space to describe ourselves. Maybe in addition to bio, we want to put up a cool story, or make a picture out of the characters. Unfortunately our creativity in that area is stifled by both the small character limit and the fact that it’s measured in characters (kids are using this site, people).

Let Us Give Away Free Items

8. Many people would like to give newer players items, or give a friend of theirs something they don’t use. You can’t gift anything at all. All of the things you have that you have but don’t use have to be deleted. Lots of newer players ask for help, but they can’t really unless there was like a gifting service. Roblox actively discourages recycling I guess…

Best Friends

9. On Roblox they have a button that lets you add up to 20 of your friends to a list called ‘Best Friends’. This is done mostly for quicker access to those friends. For those that have smaller lists this is a very nice tool. For those that have bigger lists, they would probably need a larger number of quick access friends. Many people in some schools play Roblox and they may have 20+ friends from their real-life school, plus their friends outside of school. That list should be bigger.

Roblox on Facebook

10. The Facebook Connect Tool on Roblox shows you which of your Facebook friends are playing Roblox. Unfortunately, it does not show you what they’re user names are or how to get to them. Some people would like to know how to be friends on Roblox with their Facebook friends.